Sid Meier's New Game Is About Starships

jones_supa writes: The next game from the mind of veteran strategy and simulation game designer Sid Meier has been revealed. 2K and Firaxis Games have announced Sid Meier's Starships, a turn-based interstellar strategy game scheduled to arrive in early 2015 for Windows, OS X, and iOS (iPad). In the game, you control a fleet of starships as you journey through the galaxy to complete missions, protect planets and their inhabitants, and build a planetary federation. As you trek through the stars, you will be challenged to expand your federation's influence and reach. You shall also amass futuristic technology and take part in combat using a deep roster of customizable ships. When designing Starships, Meier was intrigued by the idea of exploring the next chapter in the story of Civilization: Beyond Earth. "What happens after we colonize our new home and eventually build starships to take to the stars? What has become of our long-lost brothers and sisters from the planet Earth," Meier asks. "My goal was to create an experience that focuses on starship design and combat within a universe filled with interstellar adventure, diplomacy, and exploration."

Comments

Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Traveller, then?

Re:Old stuff.

[C0R1D4N]

Or FTL

Re:Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind a big-budget FTL knock-off.

Re:Old stuff.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Yeah it's the same song played with different instruments.

So what, it's a damn good song.

Re:Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind Star Control 2 again.

Re:Old stuff.

[Dahamma]

FTL is great, but this sounds more like MOO than FTL.

Gotta say, I hope they keep the ship design/customization relatively straightforward. In theory in MOO/GalCiv/etc was cool, but the tech tree/dev was so fast paced I always felt like ships were obsolete by the time you finished building them.

Re:Old stuff.

[cb88]

Urquan-Masters...literally is Star Control 2. They even upgraded it some I think in the sound department...

Now if you mean new material in the style with with the level of cooky inspired awesomeness that is SC2 then yes... totally yes :D

Re:Old stuff.

[gl4ss]

Master of Orion comes to mind..

first moo was pretty good. the sequels.. were missing something somehow.

a decent master of magic remake would be nice.

Re:Old stuff.

[Wraithlyn]

MOO2 was pretty good too.. the only thing I remember disliking compared to the first one was the number of ships you could build were more limited due to different supply mechanics.

MOO3 wasn't evan a game, it was a fucking spreadsheet. Never been more disappointed in a game. And I've played Daikatana and DNF.

Re:Old stuff.

[DrXym]

Sounds more like Stardock's Galactic Civilizations although that was influenced by MOO too but with more emphasis on the AI. Anyway FTL is owes more than a little to Sundog which was an ancient top down spaceship sim/rpg from... FTL Games.

Re:Old stuff.

[ConaxConax]

Sounds more like Sid Meier's Pirates! except in space.

Re:Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that was Worlds of Magic is / will be?
Don't know either game, but that's what I've heard

Re:Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I don't remember totally wrong you could upgrade your already made ships pretty easily to keep them modern? At least in GalCiv2..

Re:Old stuff.

[MachineShedFred]

Was thinking the same thing. Or Pax Imperia.

Re:Old stuff.

[Anonymous Coward]

Master of Orion comes to mind..

first moo was pretty good. the sequels.. were missing something somehow.

a decent master of magic remake would be nice.

Age of Wonders is pretty much the spiritual successor of Master of Magic.

Age of Wonders 3 came out in 2014.

Re:Old stuff.

[cheesybagel]

In other words it is like Star Control or Homeworld.

We built this city?

[Anonymous Coward]

We built this city?

Re: We built this city?

[fyngyrz]

All those moments will be lost in time ...like tears in the rain.

Re: We built this city?

[ihtoit]

Time... to die.

Re: We built this city?

[fyngyrz]

Perhaps.

But we rock and rollers burned so very, very bright!

Re: We built this city?

[ihtoit]

according to "Dangerous Days", Hauer adlibbed that entire scene, including the dove.

And the biggest threat will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Guardian of Orion.

But don't worry cheap missile boats can take it.

We can only hope...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wonder if they'll find a way to keep it from feeling like little more than a reasonably ambitious Civ5 mod, notably unlike last time?

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still curious why civ5 takes so much resources. When it runs I keep expecting my cpu fan to break off, cut through my case and proceed to decapitate me. What could the system possibly be doing while I sit there thinking about what I want to move next?

Re:We can only hope...

[Rockoon]

What could the system possibly be doing while I sit there thinking about what I want to move next?

..dealing with retarded scripting based on an even more retarded xml encoding...

Re:We can only hope...

[juanfgs]

Civ5 is unplayable for me, I'm not a hardcore gamer but I think an 8 core pc with 8 gb of ram and a SSD should handle an old strategy game . It becomes somewhat playable if I turn off the City States ( at least until the renaissance epoch) which are BTW one of the stupidest game mechanics they could possibly introduce. Luckily Civ4 runs great on WINE.

Re:We can only hope...

[unixisc]

I wish they'd import some of the Civ4 concepts to Freeciv, so that we can enjoy it as well outside Windows. One thing Freeciv does is include a whole list of civilizations. Only problem - they've made it really difficult to edit the city list of a nation, in case the cities are wrong, which I've noticed, despite them using Wikipedia as their source (or maybe because of it)

Re:We can only hope...

[Fwipp]

Just edit Wikipedia and it should fix itself, right? :)

Re:We can only hope...

[sound vision]

The weird thing is, Beyond Earth runs much more smoothly for me than plain Civ 5. Civ 5 is choppy as hell, and it's not due to the graphics. Specs:
AMD Phenom X4 9850 (ca. 2008)
nForce 4 based motherboard (ca. 2007)
GeForce 275 GTX (ca. a while back)
4 GB ddr2-800 main memory

Starting to get dated now, but Beyond Earth runs very smoothly on it.

Re:We can only hope...

[theArtificial]

"Let's do it in JavaScript!"

Re:We can only hope...

[GNious]

I just tried Beyond Earth (free on Steam - wuhu).
Seems smooth, but manages to be more glitchy than Civ5 - has several of the same issues, but throws in a few extra (incl being not-stable).

Overall: Good game, shame they forgot to fix things.

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, it was one of the first games to be created with MS' XNA framework, which seems to be a terrible choice, given it's overhead and the fact it didn't get an XBox-release.

I don't know how it's running on Linux or OSX, but i guess, the conversion from .NET to the tools available on the other platforms isn't flawless either.

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

cuz node

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, apk.

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

this has been happening since profit became more important than making a fun game..

Re:We can only hope...

[war4peace]

Next step: Endless Legend. Go try it, you'll likely be impressed.

Re:We can only hope...

[Elad Alon]

Some cities were owned by different empires at different times. Could that be the issue?

Re:We can only hope...

[moonlandingchap]

Said the 40-year old living in his mom's basement, whacking off to underaged pan-species porn... featuring his mom.

but his mum makes my wang happy :D

Re:We can only hope...

[juanfgs]

I wish they'd import some of the Civ4 concepts to Freeciv, so that we can enjoy it as well outside Windows

give it a shot with wine, it works flawlessly.

Re:We can only hope...

[Anonymous Coward]

Second that. Despite finding their G2G thing kind of sketchy, Endless Legend is a damn nice game to play.

Wot?

[Greyfox]

Kind of like Galactic Civilizations III? I'd guess they'd better hurry if they don't want Sid Meier to steal the wind from their sails.

Re:Wot?

[T.E.D.]

The Gal Civ series is part of a long-existing genre of space-based 4x games. We even had them back in the day when we used ASCII characters for the graphics (stars of course represented by asterisks), and the games were typed in by hand from BASIC source code in books.

The same goes for Civilization of course. At its heart, that series is just a re-imaging of classic Empire. The trick is what new things can be done with the genre, and can it be made more fun. Sid's got a good track record with that, so it will be interesting to see what he does here.

Stardrive 2 sounds just like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Or does this sound just like Stardrive 2?

I don't like to hear about competition

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I too am working on a space civilization style simulator for Ipad/Android tablet.

My theory was that with all the fame of games like Clash of Clans, why not take competition one step further to games like Risk, Civilization, or Master of Orion?

Touch pad is perfect for those turn based games like that. They're just a bit more challenging to write since you need to write a custom active server since P2P would just invite hackers to ruin your day.

I could talk more on this project, but its so early in development that it isn't anything more than a hobby affair. I was thinking of taking my time on this one, sculpt it just right, and have good polish on it for 2-4 years out from now. One of the things slowing me down is that I can't seem to get Java to communicate with AS3 via sockets. So it is looking like I'll probably have to write my game server in C/C++ which will be a challenge without garbage collection, nice arrays, debugging, nice strings, an ide, and so forth.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to learn marketing 101... Because just right now, I and possibly others are wondering where we can get a notification when you release something. See? This was your opportunity to recruit potential developers if it's open source, alpha testers, beta users, and possibly even clients. And who knows, it may have turned into a Kickstarter.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need garbage collection if you design your memory ownership semantics right (which you should be doing anyway for any kind of high performance app). And there are plenty of C++ IDEs.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[adonoman]

Why not write your game server in C/C++ with garbage collection, nice arrays, debugging, nice strings and an ide? Leaving those out seems like you're intentionally making things difficult on yourself.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I understand this. The project is mostly a hobby project that I may or may not be able to put time into because I'm already working on another project. So while I've made video games in the past, I'm not sure I'll actually finish this. I just don't want to dash anyone's hopes right now.

If the thing materializes better, I'd definitely like to have someone who knows marketing on board and how to make a successful kick starter. If you know anyone like that, let me know. I even have a use for a marketer now if they know how to get a quality match-3 game popular.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[mjwx]

Touch pad is perfect for those turn based games like that.

Said no gamer ever.

Sorry, but if you think touch is good for Turn Based Strategy games you haven't tried to play a touchscreen game for 3 hours and for a good TBS game, 3 hours is a short session.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I wasn't going turn based... But yes, the sessions are planned to be many hour events, but you don't need to play the whole thing. When you're not on, there's a small penalty in addition to custom AI taking over.

Touch pad is perfect for games where you make choices in drop down menus like a turn based strategy game, or a game like Final Fantasy. The touch pad generally fails for action oriented reflex/twitch video games as the controls aren't crisp.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Algan]

Erlang. Write your game server in Erlang. It's made for stuff like this - look it up. A lot of high availability, very scalable server side stuff is written in Erlang. Including the servers for Clash of Clans. Did I mention that you should write your game server in Erlang? you really should :)

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[gl4ss]

you could just do the communication part in c/c++ if you really had to... a really minor thing in the big picture of things. and really minor compared to your choice of using AS3 for the game itself...

you might be well better off just learning qml and javascript and doing it in that if you want use something like that which compiles nicely to a osx/ios/android/windows (qt has a nice c++ ide too..) application.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

What? What? Uh.. what? Turn-based games are perfect for touch. Every time I read about a tablet or touch based game, someone chimes in that x-genre is horrible on tablets, even if it's literally the genre touch work with wonderfully. RPGs and strategy games, for example, are always thrown in, as if turn-based menus somehow conflict with a touch screen. If anything, it's the opposite, and it's real-time action-based games that have difficulty using touch controls because of the need for accuracy, the major drawback of touch. As it is, you just sound like a disgruntled customer of a touch-based game with a badly designed UI who makes far too many sweeping generalizations.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want in a strategy game (turn based or other) is to have as much information available to me at once as possible, because that allows me to glance over the screen and instantly be aware of the current situation, which helps in decision making. Similarly, I want the ability to take actions quickly and efficiently, which means many buttons need to be very accessible, ideally at the top level of the interface.

This means that screen real-estate is extremely valuable, thus smaller buttons are better than large buttons, because they leave more space for other elements. This is fine because the mouse is a very precise input device. This is in direct contrast to the needs of a touch interface, where buttons need to be of a minimum size or it becomes very difficult to hit them with your fingers.

Now some people will probably scream at me: "That is Bad Interface Design! The screen is all cluttered and messy and stuff!" and I'll counter that by saying that is exactly how a strategy game should be. After playing for a bit, you'll be familiar with the interface. It doesn't need to be simple.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[TheRaven64]

If it's a hobby project, why not open source it? You can chose which patches you accept, so you retain creative control, but you might find that some people like to work on the bits that you find boring.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, I'm just writing space based 2d mmo with server in erlang ;). I've just started, but it seems 10k players in one star system (and all rendered on screen) didn't cause my 3yo laptop to even increase fan speed.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

You should definitely verify that C/C++ will fix your socket problem before you completely change your language choice. I suspect that you will have the same problems with C++ as you are having with Java. The socket libraries have been around a while and are very mature; It is unlikely that you have run into a socket issue that is Java specific.

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Wintermute__]

So it's a good thing that touch interfaces can have modal features like menus that appear when needed instead of every button having to be on the screen all the time...

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Just waiting for a bit better Qt integration in CLion, then I'll start spewing C++ all over the place!

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you read my comment on homelessness? BTW, can you tell GARRIOTT he DID get the RIGHT NAMES in Worlds of Ultima - the Savage Empire ? (Basically he called Felipe my aunt, In-Tanya says Felipe was with his nominal half sister/daughter, as per typical gossip; and ay-ella means WE ALL got Garriott! If you know what I mean...). Yeah, I also want a space game, though the theme itself is arid... But... they would NOT be using some weird notes about cubes and the like for vehicle design, would they? The inspiration came from a spatial paper-rock-scissors themed game on DS, though those particular diagram notes seem to have been stolen along with the other seven booklets stolen-from-me... In any case the more they can make it identical to the original Civilization, the more success they will get, no doubt... which makes me ask: CAN THEY PLEASE RESTORE THE ORIGINAL CIVWIN DOWNLOAD? I cannot find it anymore, I purchased the game twice then got the downloadable version (copmuters stolen from me, you know), then went to CivIII, made the web-based scenario editor, was robbed from me too, now I am again in Civ III second purchase and about to use CLIPS for the scenario editor despite its trigger language deficiencies... and STILL want to play the original CIVWIN game! Or the DOS version which I also purchased in its time, obviously. GREETINGS Sid - DJB

Re:I don't like to hear about competition

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

I'm not skilled as an open source project manager or working on any open source project. So I'm afraid I don't know how that works. There's really not a lot of code that needs to be written either. There's only like a year of code or so, and then a year or so of play testing, tweaking, and features to add.

I mean if some of you guys wanted to collaborate with me because you think the idea sounds neet, leave me your reddit.com ids here or some way to contact you. Like I said in my original post, I could really use someone who knows how to communicate from JavaAS3(Flash) via sockets. But I can also use artists, and beta testers too.

So, in Sid's view restrictions...

[EzInKy]

...as to what platforms you run will still influence the direction of the human race? The man has to beyond the pursuit of pure profit by now. Shouldn't the legacy he seeks be about beneficence, not personal gain about now?

anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Virtucon]

I've been gypped with Beyond Earth.. It's definitely crap at this point. Sorry Sid, the magic is gone.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Care to expand on why that is? (Honestly curious... I haven't played it.)

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[mjwx]

I've been gypped with Beyond Earth.. It's definitely crap at this point. Sorry Sid, the magic is gone.

Its been bad since Civ V.

Civ IV: Beyond the Sword was the high point of the Civ series, it's now in decline thanks to Firaxis chasing the casual dollar. The fact this new game is coming out for Ipads is a clear warning it's going to be seriously gimped. I dont think Sid Maier has much, if any input on the current games that carry his name, a lot like Tom Clancy.

I took a pass on Beyond Earth because Civ V was so horrible. In fact I'm still playing Civ IV BTS over Civ V.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

When the lead designers for Civ5 point to numerous problems (cities too close together, poor diplomacy) with the game, and, get this, fail to address any of them with updates, you have a problem. When that engine becomes the basis for Beyond Earth, still without any fixes, you have a questioning of motives. And when they sell it as the spiritual successor of Alpha Centari, but it plays more like an expansion to a flawed Civ5, you've lost all credibility.

Civ5 could have been the crowning achievement in the Civ series, introducing new mechanics that really freshened up the game.

Instead they forced Steam down everyone's throats (yes, let's have that argument again) for a flawed game they refused to fix, telling everyone to fuck off as they laughed all the way to the bank.

4 different attempts to fix it. All of them failed. You think anyone besides the most diehard is going to trust those assholes again?

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[AquaDuck]

Especially with the better mods fans have made. I'm currently addicted to the Caveman2Cosmos mod. You start out in 50,000 BC not even knowing language yet. It's under continuous development and improvement, so I'm practicing up on my coding and modding skills in hope of being able to contribute.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[qeveren]

I'm still bewildered that Firaxis actually cannot find a way to make a turn-based game function in multiplayer. I'm pretty sure like every other developer on the planet has managed this feat, but somehow not Firaxis.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you point me at somewhere where "they" tried to sell Beyond Earth as a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri? I mean, I saw plenty of moron fanboi posts about how it was a successor to AC, but I never saw anything about it from the actual game development team.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

I enjoy Civ V quite a bit, but I know where you're coming from... it just doesn't stack up when comparing it to Civ IV.

I was extremely disappointed by Beyond Earth because it was an obvious reskin and no real effort went into it to make it different in any way, shape or form :'(

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Zedrick]

> I took a pass on Beyond Earth because Civ V was so horrible. In fact I'm still playing Civ IV BTS over Civ V

Same here. Civ V was the last game I bought without at least downloading a cracked copy and testing it myself - it was such a huge disappointment. I still suspect the reviewers were bribed somehow, or perhaps tested the game before it got radically dumbed down, just before release?

It's not until recently that I dare buy games again, after watching reviews on youtube so I can see it for myself. I will never trust Firaxis or "professional" reviewers again.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[aod7br]

Yeah, CIV4 BTS was the pinnacle. And they killed it closing GameSpy servers, we cant play it online now! Check Realism Invictus MOD

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[moonlandingchap]

bought BE on a preorder as civV was so much fun, but found BE just a poor change of units mod for civV. gone back to playing civV again as it's better than BE. after wasting money on a game that doesn't get played, really thinking twice before buying another title in there lineup any time soon.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Daniel Hoffmann]

Civ 5 sure has problems, but it is a hell lot better than civ 4 mechanically. The abolition of the stacks of doom made the game so much more enjoyable.

Honestly my main grip with all civs are the crappy AI, after you master the game mechanics the game either becomes too easy in the easier difficulties or unfair in the harder difficulties (requiring you to find the exploits the game tech tree and enemy AI).

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

Civilization was the crowning achievement of the series. Everything else was just cash grab.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Daetrin]

I still suspect the reviewers were bribed somehow, or perhaps tested the game before it got radically dumbed down, just before release?

I think the glowing reviews of Civ5 are explainable without resorting to bribery or shenanigans by the developer as the cause.

I am a long term but relatively moderate Civ player. I've been playing since the first Civilization and have played all of them since then. Including Civilization: Call to Power and Call to Power 2, plus Alpha Centauri. And all of the Master of Orion games (including 3, regrettably) Master of Magic, and GalCiv and GalCiv2.

I am not an expert however. I can't beat any of them at the highest difficulty settings, with the exceptions of the original MoO, mainly due to Sulla's recaps and videos.

When the initial Civ5 news stories came out i was wary about how the one unit per tile thing would work, however when i first got the game i have to admit i quite liked it. It was simple and easy to get into and it was very pretty. And i've always liked one city challenges, it it made those really easy!

It took time to realize that perhaps it made one city challenges _too_ easy, and did so at the cost of making other styles of play (anything involving more than three or four cities) prohibitively difficult/unrewarding. Doing the tactical combat was kind of fun at first, it took a little while for the problems with the combat to become more clear. I did notice the dearth of interesting buildings and how long they took to complete much earlier, but i didn't really make the connection to 1UPT until it was pointed out by Sulla and others. I'm sure those problems were immediately apparent to the real experts, but for the rest of us it took a little while.

Reviewers generally don't have that much time to invest in playing a game for review. They saw the pretty and got to experience the first dozen or so hours where it was fun and easy, but with enough choices available that it seemed to present the kind of strategic depth that would allow for a great deal of replay. They never got to the point of realizing that most games end up being the initial rush to build your first two or three cities and then just sitting back and hitting "next turn" a lot.

So they gave their reviews and left it to the Civ community to do the in-depth analysis and rip it a new one.

But those initial reviews were probably correct for a lot of people. Civ5 _is_ a great game for people who want to put in a few dozen hours without facing a serious challenge and then move on to the next game. Or people who like dumping in a lot of time into a game that's at least moderately entertaining in order to pick up achievements. (I confess that i got sucked into that for longer than i should have.)

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

I do have to agree that the vanilla civ V sucked, but with all the expansions, I find it about as good as civ IV.

Have you tried the "Fall From Heaven 2" modpack for Civ 4? It is made of pure awesome... it introduces heroes and spellcasting units; religions that have actual differences (follow the dwarven religion and your temples create money, follow the demons and your temples create science...)

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

totally agree, exactly the same here. BTS is probably the best strategy game ever designed.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[WuphonsReach]

One unit per tile (1UT) sucks on the Civ5 maps because the hexes are way too large for the scale. The only way 1 unit/tile would have worked well would have been to subdivide the hexes into 7 smaller hexes while keeping the cities the same size (taking up multiple hexes).

The other major issue with the series is that instead of simply improving upon the Civ4 series (by adding hexes and fixing the stack of death issues and doing work on the AI), they brought in a brand new designer who threw out all the lessons of the past in order to put his mark on the product.

The result was a poor product with numerous bugs and many balance issues and a definite downgrade from Civ4's quality.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done Civ V in multiplayer... it works fairly well!

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[cheesybagel]

I think his last really good strategy game was Alpha Centauri and it was Brian Reynolds who did most of the work.

Beyond Earth is one of the worst he did. Trash. I thought it was even worse than the much maligned Pandora: First Contact that came out shorty before BE.

Firaxis has done some good games though. Like XCOM. But once again its another rehash of an old game. Can't they think of anything new?

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[cheesybagel]

I thought Civ5 was a lot better than either Civ3 or Civ4. At least it tried to be different in terms of the rules and for the most part it actually worked. Beyond Earth seemed like a rushed job and was poorly put together. The 'random' tech tree was pointless and sterile. Ascendancy did that a lot better.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[cheesybagel]

There was a time when Sid Meier was known for coming up with new games in a serial fashion. I mean you had Shogun, Pirates!, Civilization, Silent Service, F-15 Strike Eagle, Railroad Tycoon, etc. But that time is long gone. His name is put into endless recycles of Civilization and old Microprose game while the actual development teams of the sequels range from good, to crap. His last really new game was SimGolf which most people did not even bother playing at all.

Then again he did so many good game concepts while he was at Microprose that he can probably work on sequels of those until he dies.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[cheesybagel]

Sorry I meant Sword of the Samurai. Shogun was by someone else.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[kamapuaa]

I prefer civ 3 but civ 5 is way better than 4 if you have the mods. I understand civ 5 was borderline unplayable when it first came out and of course that sucks, but it's since been taken care of. If that's the reason you left give it another try... Leonard Nimoy's voice is the only thing I miss from 4. Not that 4 was 5, just 5 has similar, clearly superior gameplay.

Re:anything has to be better than beyond earth

[Anonymous Coward]

> I took a pass on Beyond Earth because Civ V was so horrible. In fact I'm still playing Civ IV BTS over Civ V

Same here. Civ V was the last game I bought without at least downloading a cracked copy and testing it myself - it was such a huge disappointment. I still suspect the reviewers were bribed somehow, or perhaps tested the game before it got radically dumbed down, just before release?

It's not until recently that I dare buy games again, after watching reviews on youtube so I can see it for myself. I will never trust Firaxis or "professional" reviewers again.

I've plugged Civ V in four times.

The first time, I spent three and a half minutes telling myself that the reason it was taking it so long to load was because I DID have an older machine at the time--even though it was well within the minimum specs needed to run the game. Sometimes it lagged even on games it should have been able to run without problem. I simply told myself I needed to be patient.

Then, after playing the game itself for a couple of hours, I closed it down, sat and stared at the desktop for a while, and then uninstalled it. I used the extra space to re-install F.E.A.R. and its expansion packs.

A few weeks later, I decided to install Civ V again, and did the same thing. I would do it again twice. And each time I told myself--"Just give it a chance, you spent a couple of years waiting for this. It can't be that bad, the only problem is that you didn't give it a chance the last few times you played it. Just give it a fair chance." Unfortunately...it wasn't just me. The game IS bad. It's bright, shiny, cute, and dull as all hell. It ran like ass even on higher-end machines (though I'm told that that improved with patching). It's simplified to the point of feeling nerfed--the reason I can't stand most mobile games, in fact. I actually LIKE lots of options and micromanaging in games.

I want that old magic back. Civ IV was a work of art--hell, as ancient as it is, Alpha Centauri is STILL magical. If they remade THAT with current graphics and a few tweaks, it would be worth buying again. But...yeah, I'll give BE a pass, at least for the time being. C'mon, Sid, reach down into your soul and give us back that magic, that feeling of stunned-bunny awe we had when we managed to get the best ending on SMAC!

alpha centauri?

[Anonymous Coward]

alpha centauri?

A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is war an assumed mandatory condition for space travelers? This is patently absurd (though perhaps fun in a game). Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space? Or is this war thing predicated on humans being out there?

We are entrained to believe wars are inevitable, due to differences in opinion or scarcity of material. May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is war an assumed mandatory condition for space travelers?

Because if you look at previous phases of human exploration, they all involved lots of fighting, too. There's no reason to think that exploring space will be any different - there's a lot of empty nothing out there, punctuated by a few hospitable pieces of rock. The first person to land on and claim a given rock for his own purpose damn well better be prepared to defend it from the next 30 guys who try to land and claim it for their purposes.

Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space?

Yeah, I'll go set off a dozen large thermonuclear devices somewhere in the universe - no cheating and telling you which direction to look - you tell me when you spot them, okay?

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[juanfgs]

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

Can you provide a proof of that? us vs them mentality has driven men to war from the stone age to this day. We always found a way to hate and kill each other, mainly because of our primal instinct of protecting our people from the unknown. Or in some cases war has been justified as a legitimate means to end some sort of injustice.

What you say sounds very nice, and I bet it felt good to write it. But fear and violence are part of our most basic programming, and it's something that we slowly started to drive off in most advanced societies (mainly because most of our primary needs are being satisfied).

Space traveling doesn't mean that we had found a way to end scarcity (probably being colonists on new planets mean that we have other issues and problems worth fighting for), or to evolve beyond our capacity to hate each other.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space?

No. Why would I think that? Why would anyone think that?

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[blackbeak]

Think about it, war is extremely unlikely among interstellar species. With that level of technology, you're not gonna be hunting for food. Nor will scarcity of materials be a problem. Come on, you can travel among the stars, and you're gonna find one particular solar system that you just gotta have, right? Because this one system is just soooo cool, and there are no others out there like it. So, you figure "I'll just kill off the other interstellar species using the planets there and it'll be all mine!"

Or maybe it's the other scenario: Some insect-like aliens are gonna scour the universe just to hunt down other life forms, just 'cause that's what scary lookin' (by human standards) aliens do.

Anyone who believes inter-species battles is likely to be encountered in space needs some serious help.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

it's something that we slowly started to drive off in most advanced societies

Sorry, but we haven't started shit. You can bask in ignorance, but your government has not, is not, and will not stop killing in your name. I leave off a specific country, because they all do it.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[blackbeak]

Previous phases of human exploration had a number of common or frequent driving elements that space exploration is not likely to have. Such as: zealous religious missionary activities, conquest at behest of the king, racist judgement and condemnation of indigenous cultures, imperialist overreach into another country for minerals, slaves or other goods, etc. Most of that ideology is driven by the social thinkers/drivers at the top (or the powers behind the throne) and the privileged class just below that, not by the average citizens who prefer to just raise their families in peace. Humans will probably not even make it into the "interstellar community" if the species can't shake off the rule of sociopath oligarchs.

If we can assume we've evolved enough to travel among the stars, we would have solved a number of social problems (anger management?) and tech ones as well. I would expect we'd be way, way beyond playing "Billy Goat's Bluff".

Ok, there's plenty of space out there. We might miss a few battles just looking up from earth.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Arguably, the question of whether there will be war 'in space'(as opposed to space travel, along with some messy little ground wars on inhabited planets and any sufficiently large habitable constructs; but minimal involvement between the two), depends pretty strongly on what assumptions you bake in about travel speed and cost, as well as those about the difficulty and cost of exploiting tricky objects like gas giants or very low density clouds of gas and dust.

If travel is fast and cheap, the universe is huge, so you'll really need to be emotionally involved to take much risk on protecting this rock when there are trillions of other rocks just like it(though if Berzerkers break out, their travel will presumably also be fast and cheap, and then you have issues). If travel is too slow, war gets less likely because the offense is at a substantial disadvantage: even if you can build 'generation ships' or similar that can survive journeys in the decades to centuries range, the locals will be decades to centuries ahead of where they were when you started out, while your ship will be decrepit at best. On occasion, you'll get lucky and the locals will have nuked themselves into the ground shortly before you show up; but barring that it will hurt.

It's only really when travel is cheap and fast enough that you can viably send the fleet to somewhere; but slow and expensive enough that borders, resource pockets, and assorted other points of interest are highly valuable, that there's really a good case for something that actually looks much like terrestrial war.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Jeremi]

Why is war an assumed mandatory condition for space travelers?

Nobody assumes it's mandatory for space travellers.

Lots of people assume it's mandatory if you want to make a profit selling your space-themed video game. And they're probably right about that.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

But there's one country that does it better than everybody else! USA USA USA!!!

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[swb]

Because this one system is just soooo cool, and there are no others out there like it.

Well, you could say that about the Middle East vs. the Gobi Desert -- because that ONE patch of sand has something and no others out there are like it.

As it turns out, some patches of sand in the Middle East turn out to actually have something no others out there like it have and that something (oil) turns out to be hugely important for managing and maintaining your inter(steller)national empire.

Who's to say the same wouldn't apply to outer space? Maybe there's some unobtainium material out there that just turns out to be very rare AND very useful either to interstellar space travel or use on some home planet. It's not like it's not a recurring theme in tons of scifi books, from the "spice" in Dune to dilithium in Star Trek.

It might be a fair argument to make that interstellar travel presupposes the ability to produce useful energy in unlimited quantities and mastery of such energy production also presupposes the ability to create materials and refine raw materials on a virtually limitless basis.

OK, but we really don't yet know what kind of materials make this energy harnessing possible and maybe those materials don't exist with some uniform distribution or in the quantities necessary for interstellar travel, making acquiring such materials or elements critical for maintaining an interstellar civilization and hence making it necessary to use military force to maintain supplies.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[david_bonn]

Why is war an assumed mandatory condition for space travelers? This is patently absurd (though perhaps fun in a game). Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space? Or is this war thing predicated on humans being out there?

We are entrained to believe wars are inevitable, due to differences in opinion or scarcity of material. May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

There is so much we don't know that we can't really assume one way or another. Face it, we don't even know if interstellar travel is even possible (and it is not at all clear that it is possible with our present technology, and reasonable travel times require technologies that we don't know about).

The Earth seems to be at just about the minimum size needed to have plate tectonics, which is needed to keep the planet habitable long enough for complex life to arise. If that is the case most of the "habitable" planets out there are quite a bit more massive. The downside to that is an intelligent species on even a slightly more massive planet will find space travel of any kind to be quite a bit more technically challenging than even we find it. They might even find it challenging enough that they cannot or will not even try at all. So even with us finding lots of "Earth-like" planets we still might not find extraterrestrials. So I'm not so sure we'd have located those extraterrestrials.

In a similar sense, while planets are probably common, really nice planets (with the right combination of reasonable gravity, low axial tilt, a big but not too big hydrosphere) might not be that common at all. They might, in fact, be damned rare. Certainly in that case such planets would be worth fighting over. Yes, if we have super-advanced technology, we can probably terraform a planet. But I'd hate to watch the terraforming process that would create reasonable 1 gravity on a world that was twice as massive as earth. And even a terraformed planet wouldn't be as nice a place to live as Earth still is.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

so you'll really need to be emotionally involved to take much risk on protecting this rock when there are trillions of other rocks just like it

Trillions of other rocks, perhaps. But where are they? And how far away are they? And how much will it cost to get there?

You know what, it's a lot easier to let you do the exploring, then come along and take the rocks from you once you've already found them. After all, you can go find and inhabit one of the trillions of other rocks too - why should I bother looking for my own?

See: Claim jumping. Yet another human activity.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Such as: zealous religious missionary activities

So you'd deny the good intelligent quadrupeds of Alpha Centauri V the word of God? Doesn't the good book say we're all God's creatures, and we should strive to save all souls?

conquest at behest of the king

Different from conquest at the behest of a president, prime minister, or other head of state... how, exactly? Militaries haven't suddenly disappeared - what makes you think a vast and untapped new resource being found wouldn't be viewed as "Ours by Divine Right" by plenty of rulers around the world?

racist judgement and condemnation of indigenous cultures

The very notion of space travel that's often discussed here practically REQUIRES us to conduct genocide against any living species we run across. We "need to expand beyond the solar system to preserve the species!" "Great, what makes you think that the species that live anywhere we'd find that's capable of supporting life are less deserving of preservation? You think if we just up and move in on some new planet, that's not going to disrupt already existing ecosystems?

imperialist overreach into another country for minerals, slaves or other goods, etc.

And the moment we find a giant hunk of some rare and valuable mineral that we can somehow exploit... you'll see more imperialist overreach. None of these conditions have magically disappeared from the human condition.

Most of that ideology is driven by the social thinkers/drivers at the top (or the powers behind the throne) and the privileged class just below that, not by the average citizens who prefer to just raise their families in peace.

Yes, clearly, frontier settlers just wanted to live in peace as they slaughtered hundreds of indigenous tribes, and laid waste to entire ecosystems. Look, it's clear that you mean well, but you're not being honest about human nature in the least here.

Humans will probably not even make it into the "interstellar community" if the species can't shake off the rule of sociopath oligarchs.

You're entirely too forgiving dropping all the shitty behavior of humans on their rulers. The rulers are simply a reflection of the society.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[barc0001]

> Don't ya think we would have already located some extraterrestrials if there were wars going on in space?

Why would you think that? Let's open with a quote from Douglas Adams:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
  Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Our own galaxy is 200,000 LIGHT YEARS across. This means it takes light 200,000 years to cross from one side to the other. It's friggin' enormous. And what we can observe is only relatively large energy sources like stars. Let's presume for a minute that there are some ETs happily engaged in armed conflict with each other 500 light years from us, tossing around 20 megaton nukes all day long like they're NBA players at a strip club making it rain. Assume that they are using 10,000 of such warheads against each others ships every day engaged in action around a star system. That's a total energy output of 200 GT (Gigatons) per day. The STAR in that system if it's a star like Sol will be putting out 7890000000000 GT per day of energy. How are we even supposed to detect 200GT more on top of that load? That's like going into Giants stadium at night and staring at the light arrays from the pitchers mound and trying to pick out someone flicking a lighter for a half a second in the midst of one of the arrays.

Secondly, I mentioned the "space is big" thing, right? Suppose these races developed doomsday devices that could actually kill stars and are happily wiping out each others' systems with nova-bombs. But they're fighting 500 LY away from us and their war only got really going 200 years ago. It's still going to be 300 years before we start seeing evidence of their handiwork.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[EzInKy]

It is just that war is a natural state for humans. Just look at Europe today. No matter how open and welcoming a society can be, there will always come along someone who demands subservience to the will of their sky pixie.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

"but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?"

Have you ever considered the fact that the masses and you do nothing to stop them are the reason they exist? If you know the masses are too stupid to stop them or enjoy war, then war is bred in the genes of part of the population and part of the population that can be easily manipulated into violence whether they like violence or not, no matter which way you slice it.

To put a stop to war you need enough people who are strong enough mentally to see through the bullshit and then fight against the warring faction, ironically enough. The problem is people are too indoctrinates (easy to manipulate). The gullibility and inequality in resources (no money = no time to think or to read) is what feeds all this.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[qeveren]

To anyone for whom interstellar travel is feasible, 'limited resources' isn't a thing that exists. There's literally nothing to fight over. Well, realistically speaking. A game in no way has to be (or should necessarily be) realistic.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[inqrorken]

"Let's assume, that the human race manages to balance birth and death, just right to fit its own planets, and thereby becomes peaceful. What happens? Soon (about next Wednesday) the Bugs move in, kill off the breed which 'ain't gonna study war no more' and the universe forgets us"

Though the best argument made in the novel is, 'juvenile delinquent' is an oxymoron.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[rossdee]

While it is unlikely that 2 different races would meet with similar levels of technology (at least similar enough to have a war rather than a massacre) Its more likely that humans could end up fighting other humans. Think of Star Wars )rebels trying to break away from the Empire)
And habitable planets seem rare enough to fight over so far.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[rossdee]

I thought our galaxy was only about 100,000 LY across
Wikipedia says 100,000 to 120,000

But maybe Samsung will come out with a bigger one

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

This only applies to governments as they steer people to do whatever they want, and if the people are not complacent sheep, they just make the minority look like the majority and away they go.

Man, you know what's seriously sad? Us knowing all this, but doing nothing about... it's like watching your friend being brutally beaten but you couldn't be bothered helping out because "1 person can't make a difference" *sigh*

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Resources are only as unlimited as the value of your time required to harvest them.

I could spend 3000 years scouring the galaxy for another planet with similar characteristics to the one you've found... or I could just take yours.

The energy requirements for interstellar travel are massive - which means that there's plenty of energy for developing weapons to kill you so they can take your planet - why spend thousands of years looking for a suitable replacement, when I can just spend 3 days killing you and taking yours?

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

As it turns out, some patches of sand in the Middle East turn out to actually have something no others out there like it have and that something (oil)...

Texas has oil, doesn't it?

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why is war an assumed mandatory condition for space travelers^H^H^H^H^H all organisms of all species whatsoever that anyone has ever observerd?

Fixed that for you!

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[gl4ss]

because it makes for a better space strategy game if you include the option for war between the factions.

it's not simspace you know.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

All it takes to fall back to that level is a lack of education. The majority of (educated) Americans voted for a president who started an unnecessary war.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[phantomfive]

Most of that ideology is driven by the social thinkers/drivers at the top (or the powers behind the throne) and the privileged class just below that, not by the average citizens who prefer to just raise their families in peace.

You under-estimate the desire of the average citizen to have his country win.

To Godwin this thread immediately, consider that Hitler didn't have to convince his country to go to war.....he merely went along with a desire that already existed in his countrymen. This also goes along with his irrational hatred of the Jews.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Sloppy]

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.

One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That's why 'travel speed and cost' are such important variables. If travel is relatively expensive, 'this rock' is valuable even if there are trillions like it; because the trillions like it are somewhere else. If travel is extremely cheap, you pretty much have to enjoy risk of violent death and social disapproval, or reproduce at geometric rates until even trillions of rocks are a scarce resource, in order to bother fighting over a specific one.

(Also, unless your travel mechanism posits something super-handy for travel; but magically without broader implications for energy production and density and mass acceleration and delivery, 'assumptions about travel' quickly turn into 'assumptions about availability of hardware that would beat up today's thermonuclear weapons and take their lunch money. Unless the mechanism is 'magic clean teleportation that for some reason isn't good for telefragging, covertly removing the core of an opponent's planet and/or inserting a singularity to devour it, and doesn't destroy the very concept of barriers', it probably involves heroic energy, extraordinary velocities achieved by relatively massive objects, and/or dubiously sensible manipulations of spacetime. That would be the other...disincentive...toward violence. If space travel is too slow and difficult, the attacker will generally lose because of impossibly long supply chains and a tendency to be years or centuries behind by the time they arrive. If space travel is fast, so is sending a kinetic kill vehicle large enough to exterminate an entire planetary ecosystem, or leaving an off-the-shelf unobtanium reactor rigged to blow if somebody messes with your rock.)

Barring radically exotic/indistinguishable from magic travel techniques that aren't 'accelerate in the right direction, keep doing that until it's time to start decelerating', estimates are that nuclear propulsion is on the painfully low end of potential viability for travel within reasonable time. In a hypothetical scenario that features downright practical space travel, your potential combatants are probably going to be jumpier than Cold War game theorists about what will happen if anything gets out of hand.

For extra fun, of course, unless FTL communications are available, all diplomacy takes place with a substantial time lag, since most nontrivial objects are multiple light years from one another; but if travel is supposed to be practical, you'll be able to deliver a doomsday kinetic kill weapon almost as quickly as you'll be able to exchange a single hail and reply(possibly faster, since the weapon only needs to go one way, while dialog is a round trip, so anything that posits mass delivery at .5C or better but no FTL communication implies that the guy on the other end of the line can be a smoking crater before you even receive his response, if you so choose. And, since you'll both have several years of boiling public hysteria and gnawing panic as to whether or not he shot first, and there's a low-radar-profile asteroid with your name on it; there's plenty of room for two cultures to make contact and dispatch a first strike before they've even had time for a friendly chat. For further additional fun, preserving 'second strike' capability in the face of such destructive power would involve a whole class of rather nasty and well hidden systems, potentially with deadman's switches primed centuries ago, just waiting for a misunderstanding.)

Your basic "Naval Battles of WWII; but with space lasers!" is really the starry eyed optimist's space war.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[swb]

Most of that ideology is driven by the social thinkers/drivers at the top (or the powers behind the throne) and the privileged class just below that, not by the average citizens who prefer to just raise their families in peace.

Organized human civilization has been around, what, 10,000 years? How do you suppose bands of humans dealt with some new group that showed up and wanted their fishing spot or their hunting spot or women? Pretty much everyone had some stake in the outcome and hiring a "conflict resolution facilitator" wasn't really an option.

Even a lot of Roman military activity up to about the Marian era wasn't necessarily expansionist but considered defensive against various Gallic and Germanic tribes who made incursions into Roman areas. The Romans were seriously concerned about the risk to Rome itself from these tribes it was several serious defeats that led to changes in the organization and makeup of the Roman legions known as the Marian Reforms. Prior to those reforms, poor citizens couldn't even join the army.

Plus I'd argue that most of your arguments really boil down to economics or economic pressure on existing civilizations even if some of the rationale seems explainable by religious or ideological motivations. It seems unlikely that pure political ideology was any kind of motivating factor until late in the 19th century.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[moonlandingchap]

go edit wiki then, it's all guess work measuremments anyway. they don't even know how big the solor system is yet as they keep finding new things orbiting the sun further out.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[CrimsonAvenger]

No matter how open and welcoming a society can be, there will always come along someone who demands subservience to the will of their sky pixie.

Which no doubt explains Ukraine and Russia nicely.

Or not...

Hint: most wars aren't about religion (though religion is often an excuse for war), they're about power. See WW1 and 2 for examples....

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

The very notion of space travel that's often discussed here practically REQUIRES us to conduct genocide against any living species we run across. We "need to expand beyond the solar system to preserve the species!"

These two statements don't flow together like you assume they do.

"We need to expand beyond the solar system to preserve the species" does *not* include the phrase "and kill anything else we come across".

On the other hand, you *do* need to be prepared to defend yourself if you come across a species that doesn't see the difference between expansion-of-self and annihilation-of-other.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Just Some Guy]

EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

With that level of technology, you're not gonna be hunting for food. Nor will scarcity of materials be a problem.

There is always going to be a scarcity of something to fight over. This is especially true in the void of space where breathable atmosphere (along with everything else) is incredibly scarce. Some examples of scarcity that are less material, but not solved by space-faring technology: Top positions in the social hierarchy, breeding with the hottest woman on your spaceship, lifespan, leisure time, and solitude.

Or maybe it's the other scenario: Some insect-like aliens are gonna scour the universe just to hunt down other life forms, just 'cause that's what scary lookin' (by human standards) aliens do.

Life survives and expands by feeding on other life. There are no exceptions. And before you say, "What about solar powered life?", while they may not directly feed on other lifeforms, they're still engaged in all-out war with anything "not themselves". They'll choke out their own brothers and sisters for a better spot in the sunlight.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

If you count the galactic halo as part of the galaxy, you could probably say the Milky Way is 200,000 light-years in diameter.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[WuphonsReach]

EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.

All activities in EVE (other then agent-driven mission running) are PvP. Selling on the market? You're PvPing against the other sellers who want to undercut you and sell their product faster. Mining? You're competing to harvest before someone else comes and harvests the resource.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[ultranova]

You under-estimate the desire of the average citizen to have his country win.

That need not manifest in the form of war. Think of sports, for example.

To Godwin this thread immediately, consider that Hitler didn't have to convince his country to go to war.....he merely went along with a desire that already existed in his countrymen. This also goes along with his irrational hatred of the Jews.

Really? So all those speeches were really just because he loved his own voice? Not to mention the rest of the Nazi propaganda.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but no one wants to go to Texas.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is the Universe huge- it is expanding really fast too. There are Galaxies that are so far away from our own now that we would never reach them given infinite time traveling at speed of light. (they are expanding away from us now faster than light travels).

That is mind boggling to me... not only is our universe already huge the gaps in between can be expanding 3dimensionally faster than light can travel.

Think how far light travels in a second. Wait a second... OK... the Universe is "at least" that much bigger than it was a second ago.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[phantomfive]

Really? So all those speeches were really just because he loved his own voice?

Well, if you'd actually like to understand how politics works, you can start by realizing that people aren't going to vote for him if they don't A)know who he is and B) think he can accomplish what he promises.

Surely you at least realize that the age old trick of politicians everywhere is to tell people what they want to hear.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Just Some Guy]

PvP is a lot different from war, though. Almost every board game ever made is PvP by that definition, and I don't think I'd consider Chutes and Ladders in the same category as Battlefield 4.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Anonymous Coward]

"We need to expand beyond the solar system to preserve the species" does *not* include the phrase "and kill anything else we come across".

Yes, it kind of does. You think we're going to just find another planet out there that can support life as we know it, and NOT replay "Guns, Germs, and Steel"? Let's consider:

If it's an intelligent species, we'll be in for a fight anyway - if some stranger walked into your back yard and said, "Hmm... nice, I'm going to build a house right here!" - you'd have a problem with that. Other intelligent species will be concerned with their own welfare, and are not likely to say "Hey sure, send a couple billion humans over here to eat everything in sight!"

If it's not an intelligent species, we'll feel absolutely no compunction about killing them and eating them, or conveniently replacing them with the animals and plants from "back home."

If there are microbes, there will almost certainly be some that will knock us for a loop - and some moving around with us that will devastate the native life.

There is NO scenario where we just pick up, fly across the galaxy, and get welcomed with open arms and no downsides on a planet where earth-like conditions are prevalent and life can flourish. If we want to occupy that rock, we damn well better be prepared to fight for it tooth and nail.

On the other hand, you *do* need to be prepared to defend yourself if you come across a species that doesn't see the difference between expansion-of-self and annihilation-of-other.

See my example above - would you in any way be cool with it if your neighbor just decided he needed some more space, and built an addition on his house that covered half your back yard? After all - he's "expanding himself," not "annihilating you" - you're not impacted in anyway, yet I daresay you'd be pretty ripped about his decision.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Kuruk]

Because it is a game and Beyond Earth micro managing dozens of trade convoys is boring as hell.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[ultranova]

Well, if you'd actually like to understand how politics works, you can start by realizing that people aren't going to vote for him if they don't A)know who he is and B) think he can accomplish what he promises.

Surely you at least realize that the age old trick of politicians everywhere is to tell people what they want to hear.

And so you've set up a nice non-falsifiable circle of logic. Hitler didn't have to convince Germany to go to war or persecute Jews. Every instance of him doing just that - making noises about getting living space or getting rid of subhumans - is really just an instance of him telling people what they already believed and/or wanted to hear. And of course this works for every other case of someone persuading someone else of something, or cause and effect in general.

It doesn't matter as long as we're talking about people long dead, but when the topic shifts to the inevitability or preventability of war, it might be best to demand more rigorous arguments. We wouldn't want to give up and accept defeat if victory is in fact possible, after all.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[phantomfive]

And so you've set up a nice non-falsifiable circle of logic. Hitler didn't have to convince Germany to go to war or persecute Jews.

If you actually knew history, you would see that it's true (and if you knew logic, you'd see that it's falsifiable). Persecution of Jews in Europe happened long before Hitler came around. King Frederick the great, Martin Luther, Richard Wagner.....look what happened to Mahler just because he was a Jew. Despite the fact that he was surely the greatest conductor Vienna had seen within half a century.

Furthermore, we can see that the persecution continued, even after Hitler was gone. The Jews didn't leave Poland because of the concentration camps, they left because of what happened after the concentration camps.

Re:A Boom in Civilization

[Jeremi]

EVE seems to be doing OK, and while there's war to participate in if you want to, there are plenty of people making money from mining, research, logistics, and so on.

I wonder how well EVE would be doing, if its creators had decided on day 1 to not allow war in their video game? My guess is, not so well.

No, no and no!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not installing this! Out of respect for my starved turtle (RRtycoon), ex-girlfriends (Civ 1 to 4),...

ugh

[kelemvor4]

If it's cross platform to iOS then it's almost guaranteed to be a bit lame for PC. Good for sid mier's bank account; bad news for PC gamers.

Linux support?

[Eythian]

No Linux support? What is this? 2014?

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's odd. Civ: Beyond Earth got a Linux version, but Linux isn't planned for this new game, at least upon release. Clearly they didn't see much return from the Linux port. This new game might get a port later, but it does go to show that despite Valve's efforts, Linux is still not taken seriously as a gaming platform by most game developers/publishers. If it did, we'd see more titles advertising Linux support from the beginning.

There's a reason people still don't take Linux seriously as a desktop system and why it's still in single digits.

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Date jokes aside, broadly speaking there's just not enough money for a lot of developers to warrant porting absolutely everything to Linux or Android. Windows, consoles, and iOS are where the market with money for paid games is mostly at.

There's plenty of articles and research to support this somewhat vague statement. Take these ones on Monument Valley recently (which while based on mobile, shows the market balance for iOS vs Android in the paid market for a #1 game):
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/monument-valley-team-reveals-the-cost-and-reward-of-making-a-hit-ios-game
http://www.polygon.com/2015/1/8/7513103/only-5-percent-of-monument-valley-players-paid-for-the-game-on-android

That being said, obviously this leaves the market fairly open to developers that are willing to make the effort to develop for and support games on Linux. My own game studio simply doesn't have the resources to support it, so our titles will likely never see the light of day on Linux.

Re:Linux support?

[kwbauer]

Because they are selling it to make money and you Linux guys are all about the free?

Re:Linux support?

[Eythian]

Humble Bundle per-platform stats would disagree. Linux users tend to pay the most, followed by OSX users, with Windows users in the rear.

Re:Linux support?

[Eythian]

AIUI, the Monument Valley stats are incredibly badly done. For example, me buying it, installing it on my phone, tablet, upgrading my phone and installing it there, and so on would count as one purchase and multiple installs, and so a large inaccurate piracy rate.

I am aware that the Linux market is small, but it does have steadily accelerating support from vendors.

Personally, I won't buy it if it doesn't run on Linux (or android depending on the game), as it would be a waste of money. But I'm a fairly small demographic in that respect.

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they're paying more, their numbers are smaller so it's not like they'll push Windows off its pedestal as gaming OS of choice.

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, all fair enough. The interviews with the devs do touch on multiple installs, reinstalls, etc. but basically attribute the majority of installs to piracy on the Android platform. It's always a losing battle vs piracy (infringement, whatever), but it shows in broad strokes what potential there is for making game development sustainable on various platforms.

For paid games I think generally Android alone is likely not good enough, unless you can spend crazy money on marketing. Linux alone is probably the same for now. Cross-platform is appealing, as always, but it's also not trivial to maintain multiple platform ports, even using cross-platform frameworks. There's either a lot of work even having a presence on various online stores if you're not selling directly, and if you're selling directly then there's the maintenance of your own store to worry about. Yes, these are fairly broad stroke opinions and good data is often hard to come by or trust, but amongst my game development peers and from my reading and general exposure to the industry, it's the state of play for us at the moment. Of course, outliers do exist and will always offer a counter to generalisations like this. It would be great to be one of the outliers :) It's about risk, and risk usually means investment/money.

The frustrating part of the smaller platforms is some of their users assuming platform wars or developer dislike of the userbase is responsible for less content being available, but for nearly every developer I know it's a matter of risk/reward.

Re:Linux support?

[Eythian]

You're changing your point.

> and you Linux guys are all about the free?

Demonstrably not true.

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

AIUI, the Monument Valley stats are incredibly badly done. For example, me buying it, installing it on my phone, tablet, upgrading my phone and installing it there, and so on would count as one purchase and multiple installs, and so a large inaccurate piracy rate.

There's also a problem with how Steam reports platform sales, too, that could be discouraging devs unfairly. I play Civ5 entirely in Linux, but it counts as a Windows purchase because someone gifted it to me before the Linux version came out. Basically, as I understand it, the first run counts as the platform it's sold on even if it's not the one you're actually playing/using, and if you got a game before a port existed it counts the sale as a Windows one even if you didn't run it.

With an established franchise like Civ, a lot of fans will buy it regardless of platform, even if they have to use wine or wait a bit for the port to appear, and thanks to faulty reporting, it sends a message of "nobody bought the Linux version, meh" and the result is shit like this.

Re:Linux support?

[tlhIngan]

Humble Bundle per-platform stats would disagree. Linux users tend to pay the most, followed by OSX users, with Windows users in the rear.

They pay the most per individual. But there aren't many individuals.

It's sort o like the adage where you take a smaller margin on a product but make it up in volume - Windows users may pay less, but given they are 2/3rds or more (likely under-represented) they get the most money from them. Ditto OS X and Linux - they pay more, but there are less of them.

Now, if you charge enough, you can make it up. E.g., iOS - if you create a paid app on iOS, you'll make more money than if you make it free and show ads. However, on Android, if you show ads (and rape and pillage user data) you will make way more money than if you sold it. In fact, if you add it up, selling in-app ads means you can roughly equal or exceed the amount of money you made selling it ad-free on iOS. Of course, you had to rape and pillage your user's data and show them obnoxious ads in the meantime, but hey, Android makes money.

As for Monument Valley, 10M installs and 3M paid is not all piracy - though 2.7M iOS and 300K Android sales seems a little... off. They do admit that a lot of it is multiple installs, so if we assume most users probably got it on their tablet and phone, and maybe a third device for the kids, that's about 9M installs that are legit and legal.

But still, 2.7M people paid for it on iOS, vs. 300K on Android (and of that, about 20% or 60K were FREE from Amazon). That shows you how willing iOS users are to paying for apps. I can't tell you how many are pirated because well, it'll just be a guess. And as any Android fanboy points out, Android outsells iOS 4:1, and in the US, it's around a 3:1 ratio (75:25% marketshare split).

Hence showing that selling apps on Android is a losing proposition if so few people buy it on Android, or why it should be free and with ads (rape and pillage).

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right Windows guys are in the rear. That's just where they like it.

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Contributions inversely proportional to amount of available games for their OS?

Re:Linux support?

[tlhIngan]

AIUI, the Monument Valley stats are incredibly badly done. For example, me buying it, installing it on my phone, tablet, upgrading my phone and installing it there, and so on would count as one purchase and multiple installs, and so a large inaccurate piracy rate.

I am aware that the Linux market is small, but it does have steadily accelerating support from vendors.

Personally, I won't buy it if it doesn't run on Linux (or android depending on the game), as it would be a waste of money. But I'm a fairly small demographic in that respect.

Which is why the installed rate included people installing it multiple times (phone, tablet, etc), family sharing (iOS), and unpaid downloads.

If you take it that the average person installed it three times - say on their phone, tablet and their kid's device, then 3M sales would be 9M installs that are legitimate.

As for Linux support - that probably comes later - the milk money is on Windows and OS X and iOS. Linux probably comes next, and once they figure out the ad model, Android (the only model that works on Android is ad-supported).

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Civ 5 and Beyond Earth were both ported to Linux.

Re:Linux support?

[aliquis]

That being said, obviously this leaves the market fairly open to developers that are willing to make the effort to develop for and support games on Linux. My own game studio simply doesn't have the resources to support it, so our titles will likely never see the light of day on Linux.

Isn't it the case that one(?) guy(?, team?) is behind many(?) of the ports over to Linux?

Not in a game such as this I guess but simpler ones.

I don't know if it's all that many in percent but quite a few titles at least?

May just be things on say Unreal engine or such though, maybe/likely not among all the field.

Re:Linux support?

[aliquis]

Doesn't matter since he say "we want it for free" which clearly we don't require. At least not in the case of HB.

However one could argue HB is close to free and maybe more Windows users buy their games over on say Steam sales or such whereas more Linux users watch HB because they wanted Linux games.

Then again it's "beat the average" for the extra games and there's no reason to over-do it unless you want too.

And Linux users may do it more.

However HB also used to have two tiers and now often have three and the lower level was even PWYW including $0.01 (still is but with no Steam keys) and since in reality it could be the case the upper tier games wasn't for Linux (or the other way around) that could affect things, or how much the individuals wanted each tier, or in the case there was bots / greedy people who just bought a bunch really cheap and those just happened to run Windows.

Whatever.

I'd say things are more pricey and people seem more willing to pay on the Apple platforms.

Whatever actual price is all that important for Linux users I don't know. Windows is used by a lot and lots of kids who may pirate more whereas Linux may draw a little more mature crowd who can also more easily afford paying (same as with users of Apple products.)

Re:Linux support?

[gmhowell]

Humble Bundle per-platform stats would disagree. Linux users tend to pay the most, followed by OSX users, with Windows users in the rear.

I bet starving people would pay more for a meal than a fatted American like myself.

Re:Linux support?

[bulled]

Aspyr (the company that has handled Mac and Linux ports for 2k) has been having a rough time keeping games in sync with the Windows release. Borderlands suffered for all of Decemeber and Beyond earth was broken for about a week. I wouldn't surprise me if that relationship has soured.

The continuing sync problems between the versions of other games has got me questioning if I would even buy this game if/when it was available on Linux.

Re:Linux support?

[cheesybagel]

You're talking about Ryan Gordon I guess.

Re:Linux support?

[Eythian]

If it's any consolation, my stats for Civ 5 count towards linux :) Also the X-COM game that I'm terrible at...

Re:Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to play that one. I got it from a humblebundle but never got around to playing

Re:Linux support?

[Tough Love]

It does seem more than a little idiotic to omit Android considering which way the market share wind is blowing.

I got the perfect title for it

[funwithBSD]

Master of Orion!

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[__aaclcg7560]

My roommate loved that game (MOO2). His favorite tactic was to hold his enemies at bay long enough to build out 36 Death Stars that would systematically vaporize all the enemy planets. Having 36 Death Stars firing at once is enough to bring the CPU to its knees. He never got tired of wrecking the interstellar neighborhood.

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[qeveren]

I was always fond of playing the Scumbag Humans(tm), sucking up all friendly-like to whoever was in the lead and 'helpfully' placing 'defensive' fleets (strangely consisting entirely of planetary bombardment designs and troop transports) around my ally's planets. __

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[aod7br]

Yeah, MOO2 was the best galatic civilzation game ever. MOO3 was too complex and missed the point.

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[Anonymous Coward]

MOO3 was a lot more like MOO1, entirely about macro management. As the emperor, you don't go into details of an empire, you just make guidelines and people obey. Period.

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[cheesybagel]

You only need like one or two Death Stars to win the game though.

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[__aaclcg7560]

One or two Death Stars didn't help the Emperor win in Star Wars. ;)

Re:I got the perfect title for it

[cheesybagel]

Well these Death Stars don't have the exhaust port design flaw.

Protect planets?

[Okian Warrior]

In the game, you control a fleet of starships as you journey through the galaxy to complete missions, protect planets and their inhabitants, and build a planetary federation.

That seems to be targeting only a subset of consumers(*).

What if I want to build a totalitarian empire? Subjugate and control planets, turn their productive output towards my ever-growing fleet of interplanetary destroyers? Drive my enemies before me, hear the lamentation of their women, yada yada.

Sort of like Ronan from Guardians of the galaxy?

Not all of us want to have good, clean, wholesome fun, 'ya know...

(*) I'm reminded of the children's holodeck game from Star Trek, where the "correct solution" was to broker a truce between the tree person and the water person. Made me want to puke.

Re:Protect planets?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It could turn out to be even worse: the description you quote sounds very similar to the hype for the unforgivably dreadful Spore's space stage. That was so awful that even genocide couldn't break the tedium, though it was possible.

Re:Protect planets?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm taking a poll.

Did you also eat your own snot and torture small animals when you were a kid?"

I always wondered what became of those creepy little weirdlings.

No linux eh?

[future assassin]

I'm no Linux zealot but I guess I know where the money I could have spent on this game will be going, to a nice selection of European beer while I play the free Xonotic game.

Re:No linux eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

the devs will cry themselves to sleep on their bed of money. meanwhile another ridiculous sacrifice you make for being an idiot

That'll be AWESOME!!!! Until...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds Great! I'd buy it in it's current state, but then suddenly *LOL!* No single player mode! No refund.. LOLZ!

Yeah.. getting tired of this now. Thrice bitten.

Yours truely,
Grumpy.

MOO

[Vrallis]

*Please*, please, please...let this be what I always hoped Master of Orion would become...

Re:MOO

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Appears too much like civ in a 2D space.

A turn-based game?

[BarbaraHudson]

A turn-based game? Flaw number 1.

Re:A turn-based game?

[BirdBrained]

A turn-based game? Flaw number 1.

Not if you name it "Worlds with Friends"

Re:A turn-based game?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why's that a flaw? Lots of people enjoy turn-based games.

Re:A turn-based game?

[BarbaraHudson]

It's one thing to play a turn-based game with everyone gathered around the table, so you can talk to each other while waiting for it to be your turn again, and quite something else to just be staring at a screen doing nothing except waiting for your next turn. Only one of them is actually fun.

Re:A turn-based game?

[Tough Love]

Civilization is amazing, even for shooter addicts.

Re:A turn-based game?

[ketomax]

Only one of them is actually fun.

Pocket tanks sure is a lot of fun.

Sounds like a turn based Star Control 2

[Anonymous Coward]

And sorry Sid, but I don't think you have it in you. Civ5 and Beyond Earth were, to put it mildly, disappointing.

Starships exploring the universe?

[argStyopa]

With detailed diplomacy, exploration, colonization....so, basically, Distant Worlds Universe?

Seriously, I've always liked Sid's games and I've been playing them for 30 years. But hey, DWU pretty thoroughly has that niche covered.

Re:Starships exploring the universe?

[Anonymous Coward]

There can only ever be one game of each "type" as defined by a random Slashdot user.

That is just the way the world is.
Clearly Sid needs to learn that.

Re:Starships exploring the universe?

[argStyopa]

Obviously not, it would be rather stupid to assume only one entity can exist in a commercial space. We have McDonald's and BK, we have WoW and (umpteen other clones of WoW).

My point was that it's perhaps not the best sense economically to make your foray into a different marketplace one in which there is already a very strong competitor that does everything you claim you want to do. Better to perhaps seek something novel instead of re-tread already worn ground?

Really from his mind?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

How much of this is really from his mind, vs just being paid sufficient sums to allow his name to be stamped on it?

Alternative title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sid Meiers: STARS!
(if anyone gets this reference I will be amazed)

Re:Alternative title...

[Anonymous Coward]

I did!

Too bad I lost my copy of the game years ago :(

Re:Alternative title...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a disk here with all the files on it. Hold on and I'll build a factory to build a car to transport it to you via a trade route.

Alpha Centauri is still the best

[Anonymous Coward]

And I think it was a game where Sid wasn't really working on but just putting his name on it, we owe this masterpiece to Brian Reynolds, as we owe to him Civilization 2. After he left Sid, the series have just been variation of the same stuff over and over again.
It's funny how the same things I didn't like in Civ2 are still there in the last games.
Like diplomacy.
Like a stupid unit hoarding cheating AI that stays at war with you forever.
Like the same game phases where you have to colonize land before your opponent do.
Problems that I find even in similar games like the GalCiv series.
Anyway, even if I find Beyond Earth pretty boring, at least they tried to do something a bit different, that has to be recognised.

Re:Alpha Centauri is still the best

[cheesybagel]

Beyond Earth is trash. Avoid it like the plague.

Spore

[Jarik C-Bol]

Sid Meier is just re-making spore as 3 games, and skipping the weird creature creation stage. Seriously, at this stage we have a 'conquer the world' game, a 'conquer nearby star system' game, and now we have a 'conquer you local galactic arm' game? sounds like spore, only without the insane promises.

Re:Spore

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that Spore was Will Wright and Maxis, not Sid Meier and Firaxis, right?

Re:Spore

[T.E.D.]

Hopefully he skips the rootkit "copyright protection" scheme too.

Re:Spore

[Jarik C-Bol]

Well aware. Clearly, based on your response and several others, I left the joking tone out of my post.

Anyone remember Spaceward Ho!

[Anonymous Coward]

It had starship Design and combat - planetary values mining vs population etc all in a turn based package - thank you Delta Tao

Re:Anyone remember Spaceward Ho!

[LokiFoo]

I probably still have a copy in the attic somewhere, but I don't think I have any hardware that can run it anymore.

stop me if you've heard this one before

[Anonymous Coward]

Its "Sid Meier's 'Battlecruiser 3000'!

Anyone remember....

[Anonymous Coward]

Stars!

?

Protect planets?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think the whole "turn-based strategy sci-fi" thing is the delimiting factor, here, not the fact that you're playing as a Star Trek-esque Federation (which, when I put it like that, sounds like it would increase the potential customer-base, not decrease it)

Spore

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you're very, very, very young? The Spore "civilization stage" was, if anything, a really, really bad and over-simplified Civilization. There was no Beyond Earth equivalent in Spore (Civ in Space), and this game sounds far more like classics like Masters of Orion or Galactic Civilizations than Spore's "space stage".

His games really havent changed in 20 years

[Anonymous Coward]

His games really havent changed in 20 years. Seriously, have they ??

I have an idea for a name

[Anonymous Coward]

Masters of Orion: Sid's version.

Ah, I see...

[Anonymous Coward]

>As you trek through the stars

So, some sort of... star trek?

alpha centauri

[Anonymous Coward]

go look up alpha centauri

Star Traders?

[mknewman]

So it's a Star Traders knock off?

Re:Star Traders?

[mknewman]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Re:Star Traders?

[knarfling]

I LOVE that game!! Don't want to be a trader? Try being a smuggler!
Don't like smugglers? Be a Bounty Hunter!!
Fighting not your style? Play an Explorer!
Maybe intrigue between factions is more your thing. Play a Spy!
There are many ways to play Star Traders.

Come to think of it, I play Star Traders on Android, so maybe that is why this new game is only for Windows, OSX, or iPad. The market already has this game (or a better game) on Android.

strong, selfish, sociopaths

[Anonymous Coward]

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

Before you can make that assertion, you'll have to explain how strong, selfish, sociopaths are not a natural product of mankind.

Starships were meant to fly

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands up and touch the sky

Protect planets?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to play totalitarian? That doesn't actually change anything about the bold part (or the part that follows). Even a totalitarian government wants its citizens/subjects to be *alive*, so you still need to "protect planets and their inhabitants"?

Weird

[DG]

Phenom II x6 1090t, Radeon HD 7880, 12 GB DDR2 (it's an AM2+ board), Ubuntu 14.04 32 bit. Runs flawlessly for me.

MOO3 didn't exist

[Anonymous Coward]

At least, I try to pretend it didn't (sort of like some people try to wish away The Matrix sequels.)

You nailed it on the reason it failed though. I was so excited when it first came out and rushed out to buy it. Only to think "this is just like the parts of my real job that I dislike" while playing it.
As for MOO2, I _LOVED_ that game. My battlefleet of Xenotronium armed,heavy-armored, structural re-inforced, reflection fielded, auto-repair, Class X shielded, dual Stellar Converter armed doomstars laid waste to many an opponent!

Sounds like Cluster II (Traveller)

[WillAffleckUW]

Yes, I am the Celtani Federation that sold you all those Ford starships and sent the CDT on missions against you.

Did you like my robots? Wasn't it a surprise when the Tech 15 starports from the CF were everywhere and the 10 ton battleship killers lay in wait in the outer orbits and set off nukes inside your armor in kamikaze attacks?

UQM

[PincushionMan]

IIRC, you can even have the voices and music that was developed by Toys For Bob (the company behind SC2) for the 3DO. Also, some of the original MOD files have been resampled and updated by modern mixers. I prefer the original MOD files, but it's cool that it has had updates, even 20+ years on. Many thanks to Toys for Bob for releasing the source *and* content.

Spaceward Ho!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish someone would redo Spaceward Ho! Loved that game, especially the network play

Wot?

[Anonymous Coward]

After Galactic Civ II I don't think I want a Galactic Civ III.

GCI was so good- and the second was so awful.

I just hope the UI doesn't suck

[harryjohnston]

Civ 5 was fine; you just hit the "strategic view" button as soon as it starts up and you're golden.

Beyond Earth took that away, apparently because they needed the button for satellite view and it was too hard to add another button.

The 3D view just makes it way too hard to see what's happening.

Simcity

[DarthVain]

The last Simcity I think really tarnished their reputation. They may have a hard time reclaiming their fans.

That said, if they do a reasonable approximation to MOO2, they will come flocking back. It is a fine line between a Game and a Sim however. MOO3 was the only game I ever pre-ordered (and last) for that reason. It was more Sim than it was Game. In that it wasn't really any fun. Something to be careful of if you are known for making Sim type games.